Written by: Guest Bloggers at 3:43 am
Filed under: Books
Written By: Lenstar
Historian Mike Davis has already established his reputation as a saboteur of late-model capitalism. His last book, City of Quartz, dug into the ethnic fault lines running along Los Angeles like he was mining for gold.
Now Davis trains his eye toward the pandemic we’ve all wished would just go away – the avian flu, or bird flu, in his new book The Monster At Our Door. If the title doesn’t make it obvious enough, Davis makes a case for its imminence.
Genetically, avian flu is a descendant of the 1918 flu commonly regarded as the world’s first pandemic. While official estimates vary because of underreporting in India, one of the worst hit countries, Davis guesses the flu killed up to 350 million people worldwide.
With advances in transportation, technology, and new methods of farming, the flu wouldn’t take an entire year to circle the globe as it did back in the teens. On a down side, the flu could kill more than a billion people this time around. With Britain recently announcing that the avian flu has been found in its domestic flocks, there’s no Broad Street pump handle to break off to anymore.
Davis begins The Monster At Our Door with a quick biological lesson on the emergence of the new, most deadly flu strain, known as H5N1. The flu is a mutation – or, probably, hundreds – from a harmless bug among flocks of wild birds that has passed lethally into chickens grown commercially in Asia.
The Thai government has traditionally blamed small, in-home family chicken coops for the spread of the outbreak (and slaughtered those birds, along with wild, sometimes endangered flocks in the country’s wetlands).
But the popularity of chicken in Asia has driven commercial farmers to raise more and more birds in progressively more unsanitary conditions. Bird hotels containing thousands of fowl provide the perfect place for a virus to explode, and explode without anyone knowing about it, as the major corporations involved in chicken cultivation in Thailand enjoy a close relationship with the government regulatory agencies.
The virus’ pathway from birds to humans is still unclear, although Davis speculates that another carrier animal (like pigs or cats) might be involved. Once it jumps to humans, the virus hits young children first, then the relatives who care for them, old and frail or at the prime of their life.
Davis puts the scare into readers from a variety of angles including a brief economical explanation of how an avian disease becomes a business write-off to the breakdown in world health monitoring that led to the SARS outbreak and later outbreaks of the flu.
No institution is allowed to stand, least of all the U.S. government, a familiar Davis target which in this case diverted funds from flu research to unlikely bioterror weapons like smallpox.
Governments from here to Thailand are found guilty of protecting large corporations – like Thailand’s CP, the primary producer of chickens, and the American Big Pharma – from the consequences of doing too little, too late. It’s not a fun book, but perhaps a necessary one.
Technorati Tags: Mike Davis, Monster at Our Door, Mike Davis, Avian Flu, Non-Fiction, Book Review
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A mix of work by writers who have written for Literary Illusions over the years.
